Finding Successful Teachers
In June, I posted a talk Malcolm Gladwell presented at the New Yorker conference why a “mismatch problem in the workplace” is so common and how it relates to finding good teachers. This week, his article on the same topic came out in the magazine.
Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of [a] training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated…given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.
Teachers can only be successful when supplied with the appropriate tools and support that any other professional would need to be successful. Teachers have more at stake. They have to reach benchmarks, goals, objectives and ultimately and most times more importantly raise test scores. The circumstances and factors that may interfere with the attainment of the goals and learning outcomes do not matter. I am all for excellence in teaching. A successful teacher usually loves the subject they teach and has a passion for faciltating learning for others. Many excellent teachers really do not think about how much they make. Of course we know they get paid less than other professionals or apprentices with comparable education and experience, but the reallity is that many good, no, excellent, devoted teachers will mention salary last. Many use their own money to buy supplies to keep their classroom functional. They do want support from the other adults in their studnets’ lives. They want for behavior to mean something to a parent. They want for classrooms to be healthy, safe havens that are not falling apart. They want to be left to taech and inspire. They want to be treated and respected like professionals.
We want the scholars and very knowledgeable but we also want the compassionate, caring, and motivated human being. They must be able to convey meaning and help students construct meaning.
We have all had the teacher that is incompetent. We say that they should never have been teachers. The question is how can we tell when someone who has a college degree can potentially be a successful teacher. Successful teachers breed successful youngsters and individuals that can demonstrate mastery of predetermined skills